Thoughts on sustainability

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Niel is a geeky scientist and technophile who fell headlong into the middle of the renewable energy business by choosing to do a technical PhD project aiming for an application in biodiesel.

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2012 (3)
2010 (16)
 

T. Boone Pickens and Natural Gas

There recently was a TED Talk by T Boone Pickens on natural gas. I've never heard of Pickens before, but in appearance he's a gruff, aged Texan. He speaks with the authority that comes with age, experience and money. He's a convincing speaker.

He's a patriotic American, and detests the USA's dependence on OPEC oil. This motivates his investments in non-oil energy.

He gave a persuasive talk that said, in essence, that natural gas is the bridge fuel to the future energy, and added that natural gas might very well be the bridge fuel to natural gas.

I do find some serious contradictions in his talk. He says he doesn't believe the Saudis estimate of its oil reserves, which he claims is too high, but he says that he thinks that the natural gas estimates of the US Geological Survey is too low, reckoning that the higher industry figures are better because 'the industry knows what it's talking about.' The same forces that make the Saudis over-estimate their reserves makes the US gas industry over-estimate their reserves. Ironically, it might be exactly this over-estimation of gas reserves that caused the price to drop and him to lose money on his investment in wind power.

Mr Pickens states the obvious fact that there is no more cheap oil, but then he seems to assume that there will be cheap gas for the foreseeable future. It's quite obvious to me that natural gas pumping, too, must peak.

He has no qualms about fracking. He says it's an old procedure, and it's never done any harm. He's right in thinking that fracking has been around for some time, but I don't think he understands the scale of drilling that is required for fracking to produce the masses of gas that will be needed in future. This drilling _will_ be disruptive, and accidents in the process _will_ cause environmental damage. Only a total naive can believe that current governments can enforce regulations that will prevent such damage.

While claiming to believe in global warming, he seems to totally fail to understand that we cannot burn all our fossil fuel reserves and have a sustainable future.

Natural gas is a bridge fuel. The problem is that it started being in bridge fuel in the 1990s, and that there never has been a gap to bridge: there has been no reduction in emission of greenhouse gases or in consumption of oil. Where mr. Pickens totally fails to leave a legacy is when he says the future of energy is for us to figure out, and then point out a path to sure destruction.

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

Electrify transport now.

Just a quick thought.

Electric/hybrid cars should get free access to Gauteng toll roads.

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

Where the weight should be.

Why are we making such slow progress with solving the world's environmental problems? It's because we have gigaton problems but featherweight politicians.

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

Macondo Oil

The oil spill caused by the blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon had the world's attention for a while this year, and the people who worked on plugging the well are to be congratulated on persisting until they succeeded.

There is also the good news that the oil had dispersed rapidly, and that there had been limited damage to the environment. Visions of thousands of miles of coastline contaminated by choking oil did not materialize. The Gulf fishing industry will probably survive.

While we should be grateful for the rapid dispersal of the oil, we should consider ourselves lucky. The oil spilt was a 'sweet light crude oil'. According to a scientist who analysed a sample of the oil collected by ROV from the gushing well the crude oil had a slight honey colour, and was very thin, almost like gasoline. This means that it had a smaller fraction of the heavy, tarry compounds that smother and persist, and more of the lighter compounds that evaporate and disperse easily. Disperal and evaporation would have been assisted by the summer temperatures of the Gulf climate. The crude oil also seemed devoid of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAH, some of the more toxic and carcinogenic compounds associated with crude oils.

Once again, I have to emphasize that we were lucky. We should not conclude from this incident that recovery from a deep-water oil spill will always be this quick and easy.

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

Change and Tetra Pak

In our quest for environmental sustainability, we have to keep in mind that how we do things change, and can change, and that each change can make things easier.

Tetra Pak is a great packaging material. It protects its contents from light and seals it effectively against outside contamination. At the same time it is light and flexible. Probably the greatest use for it is packaging UHT long-life milk. It is thanks to Tetra Pak that I could have fresh milk with my morning cereal during my entire year in Antarctica. Its environmental benefits are not negligible. After manufacturing the sheets of material are transported to the factories in rolls, minimizing the transport needed. (Compare this with glass or plastic bottles that take just as much transport to go to the bottling plant as to leave it.) The contents need not be refrigerated, saving tremendous amounts of energy.

Despite these great advantages, it gained a reputation as a material that is not recyclable. Essentially, this is because it constists of three materials, polyethylene, paper and aluminium. (Paper for the bulk and stiffness, polyethylene to protect the papier against moisture from the inside and outside, and aluminium to exclude light and odours.) Because of the mixture of materials, previous generations of recyclers didn't know that to do with it. Today the problem of recycling has been resolved, and Tetra Pak can be recycled completely. The South African waste paper grades now include Tetra Pak as a separate class. Because of our lack of decent support for recycling from local government you'll have to use Google to help you find your Tetra Pak collection point. There are enough of them.

Keep in mind that systems change. What wasn't possible one day is possible the next. A product with an objectionable aspect to its lifespan might change any day through the efforts of regulators, manufacturers or recyclers. Keep thinking sustainable, but keep an open mind.

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

Liquid fuels for cars must go

We know that we have to stop emitting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. We know that cars are a major emittor of carbon dioxide. So it seems logical that getting cars to emit less carbon dioxide is one way of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. That is certainly not a bad idea, but the implementation of this needs to be thought about carefully.

One of the ideas for non-emitting cars is to use the same cars with the same engines we have used for the last hundred years, but to change their fuels to 'carbon neutral' fuels, i.e. fuels made from plant materials grown for the purpose of providing fuel. Of these, the most common today are biodiesel for diesel-engined cars, and bioethanol for petrol-engined cars. The reasoning behind this is the following: growing plants take up carbon dioxide from the air while they grow, and when the fuel derived from these plants are burned the same carbon dioxide is again released to the air. In this way no fossil fuels are being burned to put excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The details make things a bit more complicated. For a start, the tractors that plow the farms are usually powered by petro-diesel, i.e. uses fossil fuels. This use must be subtracted from the savings of the bio-fuels. The fertilizer factories that produce the fertilizer used to get the crops to grow fast are major emitters of carbon dioxide. But, in general, with some uncertainties, it seems that on balance the biofuels of ethanol and biodiesel are approximately carbon neutral. But only just.

Apart from the ethical debate about using farmland that can be used for growing food for growing fuel, it is clear that even a massive implementation of biofuels to replace fossil fuels will not be possible, simply because there's not enough farmland available to produce enough fuel for all the cars in the world. Not even nearly. Brazil, with its massive agricultural capacity and the technology to match, produce the cheapest bioethanol in the world, but is not yet at the point of running its entire fleet of petrol-engined cars on ethanol. American efficiency of producing ethanol is much lower, and their car fleets are much larger than Brazil's. Most of the rest of the world's industrialized countries simply doesn't have the sunshine or the water do follow in Brazil's footsteps.

It gets sillier. Biomass is terribly solar-inefficient. I have mentioned this before, in the context of microbial biomass. This doesn't get any better for conventional crops.

A new paper from the Netherlands [1] compares the energy density of different forms of renewable energy. In short, how much energy is produced per hectare by different methods? It turns out that the ratio of wind energy:solar energy:biomass is 100:42:1. In other words, one hectare of wind farm can produce as much energy as 100 hectares of biofuel crops. (And then one can build a solar farm in the desert and plant crops on a wind farm.)

As an application, they looked at how far a car can drive on the energy gained from one hectare of land. The answer is, about ten or twenty thousand kilometers if you go by biomass, and about a million kilometers if you go by wind or solar PV.

The environmental impact of electric cars are of course not zero, but a study from Switzerland [2] shows that the construction of the battery of an electric car has a relatively small environmental impact over its lifespan, and that most of its impact is caused by the production of electricty to charge it, so there is very little environmental reason to prefer ethanol and biodiesel-engined cars over electric cars.

I think the land-use argument as set out above, on its own, is enough to show that the future of cars lies not with ethanol or biodiesel but with electric cars. That is, if we are aiming to have 10 billion people on earth and feed them all.

That's not to say that biodiesel and ethanol won't have a role to play. But it's role won't be that of taking people shopping or the kids to school.

In my opinion, government efforts that go into biofuels are mostly for geopolitical reasons, for some people in power to retain the status quo. Massive investment in solar power is what is needed now, so that we can have our clean-running electric cars a soon as possible.

Make mine Tesla Roadster.

[1] T.J. Dijkman, R.M.J. Benders, Comparison of renewable fuels based on their land use using energy densities, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Volume 14, Issue 9, December 2010, Pages 3148-3155, ISSN 1364-0321, DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2010.07.029.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VMY-50NB9R5-P/2/060c3a282f1307...
Keywords: Land use; Biofuels; Wind electricity; Solar electricity

[2] Contribution of Li-Ion Batteries to the Environmental Impact of Electric Vehicles
Dominic A. Notter, Marcel Gauch, Rolf Widmer, Patrick Wger, Anna Stamp, Rainer Zah, Hans-Jrg Althaus
Environmental Science & Technology 2010 44 (17), 6550-6556

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

Systems

Today I heard, rather secondhand, that an MEC for Agriculture said (amongst other things) people should plant a tree after they had used airline travel.

Now this is a noble attituded to have, but noble attitudes are not going to save the planet, and urging people to plant trees without giving them the means to do so is plain pointless.

Instead, the MEC, or minister, or whatever should put systems in place so that the tree is guaranteed to be automatically planted (or some other carbon-sequestering technology implemented) when the aircraft takes off. Sustainability in a society that depends on the complex systems of air travel will be achieved through complex systems of mitigation and not through noble thoughts.

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

Green morals.

I think the world needs less moralizing about sustainability. We are preached at by the screaming greenies that we are wasteful and greedy, and that will cause the environment to collapse.

The result is that, instead of trying to be more efficient, we start feeling guilty about what we do, and start to think that being green means making sacrifices. Some of us confess our sins and try to be green by making tiny but inconsequential savings. The rest of us just get to feel guilty, because our behaviour is determined mostly by economical factors.

This survey shows the result of such thinking: most people do not understand the most efficient ways of saving energy.

What is needed is not moralizing, but an economy that is structured to make sustainable living also the most economical lifestyle. It should not be much of a personal choice: the minimum SABS-approved electric geyser should be as efficient as possible, not the heat-leaking tin can that it is, and the mortgage for a new house should not be approved without the installation of a solar water heater. The new carbon-emssions based tax on cars is a step in the right direction.

If moralizing can be of any use, it will be of use in getting us to vote for the politicians who are least likely to steer the economy towards an environmental disaster.

(Coincidentally, environmental disasters also lead to political instability: in an African example, the destruction of the Somali fishing industry by the 2004 tsunami gave rise to the boom in piracy along that coast.)

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

Recharging

With the stimulus package in the US finally helping to get electric cars on the road in that country, the changes in car-maintenance routines will be interesting to watch.

I have always been under the impression that a first-generation car's recharging would take overnight. (Just by the way, I wonder how much carbon emissions would be saved if the US moved from using a 110V system for domestic electricity to 220V like the rest of the world. A higher voltage would mean waste through resistive losses. Has anybody done a life cycle analysis for that?)

From this Scientific American article I learned that at a high-voltage public charging station, the Nissan Leaf would mostly recharge in about 30 minutes, and in the comments people tallk about Japanese systems that would allow a recharge in 15 minutes. Wow! Suddenly it seems to me that electric cars are much more practical than I thought.

The article raises the question about what one would do during that 30 minutes, and mentions that it would not be polite to leave the car plugged in while one went shopping, and mentions that recharing at a public station would me more like queueing at a car wash than going to a filling station. While this is true, it is an example of "stuck in the past" thinking, extrapolating poorly from current systems to future ones. I can think of different scenarios of how recharing would be different from refuelling.

First of all, unlike with petrol pumps, it would be easy to create multiple parallel recharging bays. While not all the cars in these bays would be charging at the same time, due to limits in current, it would remove the 'hogging a recharger' fear.

In the South African context, a charing station would probably come with attendants, who could disconnect the power when the car had finished charging.

It would also be trivial to create a connector that ejected itself when the charging had finished, allowing the next user to use it.

One could also perhaps create a timed charge. Say you were going to watch a movie, and were sure to be away for two hours. One could then tell the system that, allowing charging at a reduced current, for a reduced price.

While I don't know if any of these solutions would be implemented, it is important not to try to predict future behaviour or systems. Put things in place, and let the market and people work out what works best. In the early days of cars they were refuelled from cans, sold by pharmacies. There was a two-year gap between the creation of the first dedicated filling station in the US, in St Louis, and the second, in Seattle.

What I sincerely hope is that car manufacturers would from the beginning decide on a standard recharging interface, or at least cooperate through an organization like the IEC to create an evolving standard. This will allow independent rechargers to get into the market.

No, for a while recharging your electric car would not be as simple as filling your car's petrol tank. But then nobody said solving the problem of global warming has a single simple solution.

Posted by Niel Malan 
 

No panacea, nowhere

It's Youth Day, Bafana will be playing Uruguay at Loftus so travel in Sunnyside and Hatfield is not advised, and it's very cold, so I'm spending the day catching up on the literature for my PhD. I just read an interesting article on "Why microalgal biofuels won´t save the internal combustion machine"

Of necessity in my studies I have been aware of work in the field of microalgal biodiesel. The claims have been that microalgae have a much higher yield per hectare than conventional crops. Apparently these claims have never been really substantiated in any peer-reviewed papers.

"Biomass yields in experimental raceway ponds reach 30-60 t ha-1 y-1 [tonnes per hectare per year], as demonstrated in the Aquatic Biomass Program and elsewhere. However, typical biomass yields of commercial systems are in the range of 10-30 t ha-1 y-1, similar to conventional tropical agriculture, where dry biomass yields of 20-25 t ha-1 y-1 for crops such as sugarbeet, maize, sorghum, and sugarcane are routinely obtained. On test plots, sorghum can yield up to 50 t ha-1 y-1, while Miscanthus harvests have reached 61 t ha-1 y-1, and sugarcane 72-80 t ha-1 y-1 clearly higher than measured annual yields of algal biomass in experimental systems."

For a while I wondered if microalgae-derived biodiesel would solve all our future transport energy problems. It now seems that it won't, at least not in this century.

Indeed, in one aspect microalgal farming seems almost comical: a modern solar electrical plant, be it photovoltaic or solar thermal, convert about 30% of the sunlight that falls on it into electricity. An algae pond converts about 1% of the sunlight that falls on it into biomass, and that still has to be converted into useful energy!

It has also been claimed that algae can be used to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, by siting them near power stations and letting the algae ponds absorb (some of) the carbon dioxide. This would work, of course, but if the biomass were eventually burned the carbon dioxide would still end up in the atmosphere, and there would only be a nett saving if somewhere the equivalent amount of oil was not pumped from under the ground. At the moment there is no plan to stop pumping oil anywhere, so this kind of 'mitigation' would be a waste of effort.

The author concludes that the current large investments in algal biofuels are "highly premature", wasteful and could better be applied elsewhere. Of course, the use of farmed microalgae has the potential to supply us with nutrients and perhaps medication and other products and can be used to purify our wastewater, but it seems that its use in the field of energy will be negligible.

In my literature review I often come across reports of new species of algae being evaluated for their oil-producing ability. I think with sympathy of the poor postgraduate students who are doing those studies for nothing.

Posted by Niel Malan